"Few people openly admit to holding racist beliefs but many psychologists claim most of us are nonetheless unintentionally racist. We hold, what are called "implicit biases". So what is implicit bias, how is it measured and what, if anything, can be done about it?"

When people tell me they are surprised to hear that I don't like all black people, I remind them of how little African-Americans were exposed — until recent decades — to positive images of themselves in media and elsewhere.

I think my condition began at age 4. My parents broke the news that I could not go to the amusement park near our southern Ohio home because it did not admit "colored people."

I didn't know it at the time, but it was the beginning of my re-education in being part of an underprivileged class of Americans. Almost everywhere I looked, I saw images of white people achieving things and black people singing, dancing or getting arrested.

The world has changed a lot since then, thanks largely to the hard-won victories of the civil rights revolution. But black self-hatred is not dead, even in this era of a half-black president; it has merely diversified."

"Too often, racism is seen as a social phenomenon that happens to black people. But it happens through black people as well. That is, the negative associations thrust upon black people and black culture can color how we black people view each other. Blacks and whites receive the same narratives and images that perpetuate stereotypes of black criminality and flippancy while synonymizing white culture with American values. It is to be expected that there will be an observable impact on black intragroup perceptions."